There are a number of "sub-hobbies" within amateur radio. It's a lot like asking what people with a Linux box actually do with their setups. From a completely practical point of view, the internet and cell phones can do most of what ham radio can do; people do it for fun.
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.